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Robert Sallares

Abortion was controversial in antiquity. Doctors taking the Hippocratic Oath (see hippocrates (2)) swore not to administer abortifacients, but other Hippocratic texts suggest that prostitutes (see ...
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Abortion was controversial in antiquity. Doctors taking the Hippocratic Oath (see hippocrates (2)) swore not to administer abortifacients, but other Hippocratic texts suggest that prostitutes (see prostitution, secular) often employed abortion. A *Lysias fragment suggests that abortion was a crime in Athens against the husband, if his wife was pregnant when he died, since his unborn child could have claimed the estate. Greek temple inscriptions show that abortion made a woman impure for 40 days (see pollution).The Stoics (see stoicism) believed that the foetus resembled a plant and only became an animal at birth when it started breathing. This attitude made abortion acceptable. Roman jurisprudence maintained that the foetus was not autonomous from the mother's body. There is no evidence for laws against abortion during the Roman republic. It was common during the early Roman empire (e.g. Ov. Am. 2. 14), and was practised for many reasons, e.g. for family limitation, in case of *adultery, or because of a desire to maintain physical beauty.Less

Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth

Ephēboi originally meant boys who had reached the age of puberty, and was one of several terms for age classes; but in 4th-cent. bce Athens it came to have a special paramilitary sense, boys who in ...
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Ephēboi originally meant boys who had reached the age of puberty, and was one of several terms for age classes; but in 4th-cent. bce Athens it came to have a special paramilitary sense, boys who in their eighteenth year had entered a two-year period of military training. In the first year they underwent, in barracks in Piraeus, training by paidotribai (physical trainers) and technical weaponry instructors, all under the general supervision of a kosmētēs and of ten (later twelve) sōphronistai, one from each of the tribes (*phylai). In the second year they served at the frontier posts of Attica as peripoloi. They may have had ritual duties.Despite the military amateurism of which Thucydides (2) makes Pericles (1) boast in the surprising ch. 2. 39, it is unlikely that there was no system of training before the 4th cent., and traces of the later ‘oath of the ephebes’ (RO no. 88) have been detected in e.g. *Thucydides (2) and *Sophocles (1).Less

Helen King

Hysteria, contrary to popular belief, was not so named by the Greeks. In Hippocratic *gynaecology (see hippocrates(2)) the womb (Gk. hystera) was indeed believed to ‘wander’ around the body, as a ...
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Hysteria, contrary to popular belief, was not so named by the Greeks. In Hippocratic *gynaecology (see hippocrates(2)) the womb (Gk. hystera) was indeed believed to ‘wander’ around the body, as a result of menstrual suppression, exhaustion, insufficient food, sexual abstinence, or because it is abnormally dry or light (e.g. Hippoc.Mul. 1. 7). However, neither the classic picture of symptoms familiar from 19th-cent. literature, nor the disease label, existed. Hysteria derives not so much from Hippocratic medicine, in which a number of different disorders were distinguished according to the part of the body to which the errant womb moved (e.g. Mul. 2. 123–31), as from the category of ‘suffocation of/by the womb’ dating to the Hellenistic period. The discovery by *Herophilus of the ligaments anchoring the womb to the abdominal cavity led to new explanations of how the womb could cause disturbances of breathing. *Galen (De loc.Less

Marilyn B. Skinner

Matrilocality denotes a pattern of *marriage in which the groom resides with the bride's parents, as opposed to the more common patrilocal marriage, where the bride goes to live with the groom's kin. ...
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Matrilocality denotes a pattern of *marriage in which the groom resides with the bride's parents, as opposed to the more common patrilocal marriage, where the bride goes to live with the groom's kin. Both patterns occur in Greek myth and saga and may have coexisted in bronze age society. An essential concomitant of Homeric patrilocal marriage is the suitor's presentation of hedna, ‘gifts’, to the prospective bride-giver. In exceptional cases the girl is bestowed anaednon, ‘without gifts’, in restitution or as recompense for service (e.g. Agamemnon's promise to *Achilles at Il. 9. 146). Although hedna were once reckoned as ‘bride-price’ to compensate for the loss of a daughter, they are more plausibly explained as a pledge for the daughter's security. Instances of marriage by capture and marriage by contest are variants of the patrilocal pattern. Conversely, for families without surviving sons, matrilocal marriage permits a daughter's husband to perform a resident son's duties and claim the estate. This custom must be distinguished from matriliny, or regular succession through the female line, as the son-in-law only inherits by default. In *Homer such unions with heiresses involve close male kin: *Diomedes(2) (Il.Less

D. M. Halperin

Male prostitution was a common feature of ancient Greek and Roman societies, and to many ancient city-dwellers it was an unremarkable fact of social life. Male brothels, consisting of individual ...
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Male prostitution was a common feature of ancient Greek and Roman societies, and to many ancient city-dwellers it was an unremarkable fact of social life. Male brothels, consisting of individual cabins (oikēmata: Aeschin. In Tim. 74, Diog. Laert. 2. 31, 105), were a familiar sight. Clients were chiefly male. Athens collected a tax from the earnings of both male and female prostitutes (pornikon telos: Aeschin. In Tim. 119), so male prostitution was evidently permissible, but in the case of Athenian citizens it entailed, at least by the 4th cent. bce, civic disqualification or disenfranchisement (atimia or ‘loss of honour/status’): any male who sold his body to others for sexual use disqualified himself by that very act from taking part in public life (speaking in the Assembly, serving as a magistrate, or bringing a lawsuit, for example). Prostitution on the part of citizen males at Athens during the classical period was possible, then, only if the prostitute had reached the age of majority and was his own master. Any parent or guardian who prostituted a boy still under his authority, any person who enticed an Athenian youth into prostitution by offering him money for sexual services, and anyone who acted as a procurer for an Athenian youth was considered to have ‘defrauded him of the City’ and incurred serious penalties as a consequence (including death, in the case of procurers). An indictment for prostitution (graphē hetairēseōs), however, was not a prosecution for the crime of prostitution but an action designed to indict the defendant as a prostitute, to make him a non-person in social terms, and thereby to bar him from the exercise of civic rights; any male who did exercise those rights after having been so indicted could be put to death.Less

Nicholas Purcell

Pudicitia, the personification at Rome of women's *chastity and modesty, interestingly identified originally as specific to patrician women until the cult of Pudicitia Patricia in the *forum Boarium ...
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Pudicitia, the personification at Rome of women's *chastity and modesty, interestingly identified originally as specific to patrician women until the cult of Pudicitia Patricia in the *forum Boarium was challenged (296 bce) by one Virginia, a patrician lady married to a plebeian consul (Livy 10. 23. 6–10), who established a cult of Pudicitia Plebeia in part of her home. The cult was also exclusive of all but women who had married only once. *Livy laments the decline in moral standards of participants in the cult by his time.Less